This Can’t Be Tofu: Little Cubes of Curried Goodness

sauteed asparagus with curried tofu and tomatoes

I’m halfway through the set period for this experiment and am only a bit over one-third of the way through the list of cookbooks. This is a fairly straightforward problem. To get through the list by my June 30 deadline, I need to be making more recipes each week, and this means I need to do more cooking on weeknights.

On paper this looks very simple. I wrote out a list of the weeks from now until June 30, and then assigned books to each week. First I scheduled the books that I’d already allotted to each month, and then I added in the 12 books that I never got to from the first half of the project. Each week has two or three books to deal with. Mostly three. I did a little fiddling to make sure that no week featured only the bad books from the Recipes of the Damned set, but overall I felt that this was a very workable plan. And it is. The batches of potential recipes for each week are both small enough to be manageable (I only have to do one from each book, after all) and large enough to push me not to over-think any single book’s selections. In theory this should work.

So I’m a little worried after Monday night’s efforts. The food was terrific — more on that shortly. The recipes performed as promised, or even better. The ingredients were not impossible to find, or unreasonably priced. The steps were clear and easy to follow. And yet, we were sitting down to eat at 9:15 pm. This had not been my plan.

I know that doesn’t sound so bad. As I type, fresh from having finally watched “Julie & Julia,” I am very conscious of the fact that when Julie Powell worked her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking she often did not have dinner on the table until after 10 at night. All year long. I am also very aware that I don’t have even a fifth of the recipes to complete that she did. I don’t have to make aspic if I don’t want to. (And believe me, I don’t want to. Oh, how I don’t want to.) But I am somehow still disorderly and disorganized enough that a not-overly-complicated stir-fried dish and a baked pudding took me the better part of two hours to pull together, and I am not inclined to give myself points for having spent part of that time washing dishes in order to clear the sink for the evening’s work.

Granted, I don’t think Julie Powell paused every few minutes to obsessively photograph things, or spent time formatting the photos and uploading them. This does contribute to the overall workload. Not a lot, but enough to make a difference.

At any rate, it’s clear to me that I’m going to have to do more advance planning. So for example, picking up the groceries the day before rather than on my way home from work that same day. Or reading through the recipes more carefully to plan what I can do simultaneously — so that (not to make an example of last night or anything) I can make sure to set a pan full of water to boil before I am done with all of the vegetable prep, rather than having to stop and wait for it to be ready. Or making sure that if I’m planning to do blog cooking one night I have not left half a sink of dishes soaking from the night before.

That said, the sauteed asparagus with curried tofu and tomatoes was worth the wait. The book, This Can’t Be Tofu, dates from my vegetarian heyday, yet I don’t think I’d ever used it before. I’m pretty sure it was one of those books I’d periodically flip through and think “I should make that dish, or that one” before resorting to my usual improvised tofu stir-fry. I have been missing out.

It helps that I like tofu. It’s a terrific, versatile food, and it tastes good, and it is its own thing. I have no patience with people who assume that if you like cheeseburgers or bacon, or bacon cheeseburgers, you can’t possibly like tofu. It’s true that if what you really really want is a bacon cheeseburger and instead you eat miso soup with cubes of soft tofu floating in it, you will not be satisfied, but you shouldn’t expect the tofu to do exactly what the bacon cheeseburger would do. (Particularly to your arteries.) But that’s going to be true any time you substitute what you think you should have for what you really want but insist on resenting the decision, and it’s especially true if you substitute a caricatured version of what you think you should have for what you really want. Don’t blame the tofu if the real problem is that you lack the courage of your convictions.

Anyway. All this is a long-winded way to say, tofu is good stuff, and this asparagus dish is an exemplar. I started (after the vegetable prep) by dicing a package of extra-firm tofu into cubes — “about the size of a sugar cube,” said the book. I boiled some water and cooked the cubes in it for about two minutes, then drained them and spread them out on two layers of paper towel, and used another paper towel to blot the moisture on top. I then tossed the tofu cubes with a mixture of sugar, pepper, curry powder, turmeric and salt, then sauteed them in canola oil until they were nicely browned; once they looked right, all golden and crusty, I scooped them from the pan and set them aside. This sounds more complicated than it was in practice, and from boiling to frying can’t have been more than 10 minutes, tops.

I returned the pan to the heat, added a little more oil, and sauteed some garlic, cumin and onion; once the onions were translucent I raised the heat and added some asparagus (cut into roughly three-inch lengths), red pepper flakes and salt, and sauteed that mixture until the asparagus was tender but not limp. In the spring with thin asparagus this might take five minutes, but I had thick out-of-season asparagus and it took closer to eight minutes for the color and texture to be right. Then I added some diced roma tomatoes and the tofu cubes, cooked the whole mixture for about a minute more, and then turned off the heat and stirred in some chopped cilantro and a little more cumin.

Oh, man, this was good. I served it over rice. The flavors were lively: the curried tofu was spicy without being overly hot, the asparagus blended a bitter undertone with a hearty vegetable taste, and the onions gave the whole thing richness and pop. Even the sadly out-of-season tomatoes gave a balancing tang; this will be exceptional when I can make it with local, ripe tomatoes.

Verdict: Success. I’ll be making this one again, but I think I’ll wait until asparagus and tomatoes come into the Greenmarket this spring.